Commentaries for American Art
Thinking Art History and Black Studies Together
American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, seeks papers that investigate the methodological intersections between art history and Black studies, understood as both theory and practice, as well as the institutions and individuals who have championed them. Selected essays will contextualize parallel developments, paradigm shifts, and state-of-the-field overlaps and divergences in art history, visual and material culture studies, and African, African American, and African diasporic studies in or out of museums and universities. Such shifts remake value hierarchies and historical frameworks; refigure artistic genealogies, geographies, and milieus; and introduce new interpretive approaches that influence adjacent fields.
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have invested in the relationship between art history and Black studies since their founding, with educators and alumna simultaneously working as artists, archivists, gallery directors, curators, and administrators to break the color line. Longstanding concerns with visibility and visual culture in Black thought also abound, from descriptions of the White gaze by W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon to numerous objections at the pervasive White supremacist representations of Black subjects in the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere. Additionally, art history was central to Melville Herskovits’s and Robert Farris Thompson’s efforts to trace African presences in the material culture of the Americas—efforts that unfolded alongside the Black Power movements and the creation of Black studies departments in the United States. Yet many of other stories remain untold.
Scholars circling through both fields have crafted alternative methodologies inside each discipline (and at their intersections). At the turn of the 1990s, cultural critics including Michele Wallace, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy underscored the importance of art and visual culture for exploring how the Black Diaspora defines Western culture. In recent years, scholars have turned to Black studies methodologies to center African-descended people as makers, muses, geniuses, and innovators as well as to identify and trouble art history’s White-supremacist methods and institutional practices. Saidiya Hartman, Kellie Jones, Tina Campt, Richard Powell, Fred Moten, and Huey Copeland, for instance, have interrogated relations between objects and objecthood, the value of comparative analysis, racialized and gendered hierarchies of the senses, and the limits of the ocular and the visual (as rhetorics, rubrics, heuristics), among others. Thinking art history and Black studies together expands the roots and aims of both disciplines.
Type: Journal
Submission guidelines: American Art invites article submissions from scholars at all career stages and regardless of institutional affiliation. The journal will consider feature articles up to 14,000 words, as well as proposals for multi-author short-format essays. For accepted submissions, the journal provides full-color for all images and a sliding-scale payment to cover image costs.
Submissions to American Art must be wholly original-neither under publication consideration elsewhere nor previously published in part or in whole, whether in print or online. Additionally, the submission must not be an expansion or abbreviation of other published works that approach the topic from the same point of view.
Prospective authors may email the executive editor, Robin Veder, for pre-submission consultations. Listen to Robin Veder and freelance editor Cara Jordan discussing the Toward Equity in Publishing program and other advice on preparing scholarship for publication in the latest CAA Conversations podcast.
If you would like to take advantage of a new program offering editorial support and training in all aspects of preparing and revising a manuscript, please read more from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s website.
Feature Articles:
The standard length for feature articles is 9,000-14,000 words including endnotes, with 15 to 20 images. Shorter manuscripts may be considered, following consultation with the editor. Authors may be asked to increase or decrease word count and visual illustrations, depending on the peer-reviewers’ and the editor’s assessments of the manuscript.
Submissions to American Art will be screened by the executive editor in consultation with the journal’s editorial board and, if of initial interest, sent out for double-anonymized peer-review. Manuscripts with interdisciplinary and cross-field material may be evaluated by scholars in those areas in addition to those specializing in art history.
Evaluation criteria include:
- relevance to the journal’s mission, scope, and readership
- originality and forcefulness of the argument
- significance in relationship to existing scholarship
- effective use of visual and textual primary sources
- logical organization
- clear and concise writing
- validity of interdisciplinary and cross-field claims
Short Formats
The journal regularly includes “Commentaries,” which are a group of short essays on a single theme. Contributors are encouraged to frame Commentaries as state-of-the-field interventions, demonstrations of methodological approaches, or debates on theoretical positions.
In the “Perspectives” format, two or more scholars present short and inventively complementary or divergent readings of the same object.
Short-format essays typically run 1,500-3,000 words including endnotes, with 1–5 images each.
To propose a multi-author short-format contribution, submit a 250-word abstract of the proposed theme with the organizer’s CV. A list of possible participants and topics is encouraged; abstracts for each paper are preferred. If full papers are already available, the organizer may submit all manuscripts and abstracts in a single packet.
After editorial review, the full package of manuscripts, abstracts, and images will be sent out for external peer-review; or, in consultation with the organizer/guest editor, the journal will commission the essays.
Images
As noted above, American Art will pay the author an amount to cover, or at least offset, fees associated with image rights and reproductions. The payment is on a sliding scale; accordingly, the payment is determined by the article’s requirements and the journal’s budget.
If the manuscript is accepted, the author will be responsible for acquiring publication-quality images for the article and all copyright permissions for reproduction.
Submission Checklist
Cover letter with author’s name, email address, telephone number, and mailing address.
- Abstract of 250 words that succinctly states the thesis, principal findings, and original contribution. Submit as Microsoft Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font.
- Manuscript with text and endnotes prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. Submit as Microsoft Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font.
- Suggested illustrations with reference numbers and full captions, including repository. Submit all images in one PDF document.
- To facilitate double-anonymized peer-review, delete all information that could reveal the author’s identity, including indications in the endnotes and acknowledgments.
- Submit all materials by email to Am****************@si.edu.
Authors will receive a confirmation notice upon receipt of the submission packet.
Submission deadline: May 1st, 2025
Institution: The University of Chicago Press Journals
Link: for more information about the CFPs, click here
